REVIEW: ‘Cymbeline’,
Titchfield Festival Theatre,
The Great Barn, Titchfield.
ACTOR/DIRECTOR Stuart Hibbard’s wise decision to heavily edit this complex and lengthy plot, made this potentially rambling tale considerably more accessible and enormously enjoyable, with its improbable mix of clandestine marriage, wicked stepmother, oafish stepson, villainous Italian, banishment, deceit, betrayal, reconciliation and forgiveness, not to mention a battle, decapitation, sleeping draughts, and long-lost children !
A number of extremely satisfying performances graced the production, none more so than Hannah Wood’s compellingly loyal heroine Imogen, who, with Holly Robinson’s devoted servant Pisania, provided one of the best partnerships seen on the Titchfield stage for some time.
Stephen Ward looked and sounded suitably aggrieved as Posthumous (Imogen’s clandestine love), and Russell Churcher’s oafish Action-Man Cloten, strayed most enjoyably in to the realms of panto, before literally losing his head.
Rose Malyon was excellent, too, as the Amazonian Guidarius, and Stuart Hibbard (the scheming Iachimo) was suitably admonished in the typically Shakespearean denoument”.
Ed Howson
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